Day 1 - 4 hours
After much procrastination in starting my field experience blogs, I shall begin.
My first four hour day began with an intro to Milton's Paradise Lost. The teacher let the students know what the book was like, that it is good however monotonous at times and very long. Rather than saying "we're going to read it and you're going to like it" the teacher was real with the students, letting them get the sense that he's on their side and together they will get through the text.
There was a lot of leg-work done as a precursor to Paradise Lost including reading the first few chapters of Genesis, for context, and learning a bit about Milton and the time in which he lived. It was the teacher's assumption that as the students read the text they could use that prior knowledge to help them analyze the text, which they were doing as they began reading that day, but I question if the teacher could have integrated this information more seamlessly as they read.
As they read they stopped as the students got tangled up in the language. The teacher had spots in mind in the text where he was planning on stopping and stuck to this method. He guided the students through using the text and the information they had to create meaning. He would emphasize an idea and have the students decompact it. He wrote the idea on the board and as the students suggested things they pulled out from the text he wrote it around the main idea. This could help the students, yet they weren't engaged in the activity which showed by the fact that so few students wrote, many of the students not even having their notebooks open. This makes me worry. How important is it for students to take note on literature? And if it is really important how can we make students take notes without making them take notes?
My first four hour day began with an intro to Milton's Paradise Lost. The teacher let the students know what the book was like, that it is good however monotonous at times and very long. Rather than saying "we're going to read it and you're going to like it" the teacher was real with the students, letting them get the sense that he's on their side and together they will get through the text.
There was a lot of leg-work done as a precursor to Paradise Lost including reading the first few chapters of Genesis, for context, and learning a bit about Milton and the time in which he lived. It was the teacher's assumption that as the students read the text they could use that prior knowledge to help them analyze the text, which they were doing as they began reading that day, but I question if the teacher could have integrated this information more seamlessly as they read.
As they read they stopped as the students got tangled up in the language. The teacher had spots in mind in the text where he was planning on stopping and stuck to this method. He guided the students through using the text and the information they had to create meaning. He would emphasize an idea and have the students decompact it. He wrote the idea on the board and as the students suggested things they pulled out from the text he wrote it around the main idea. This could help the students, yet they weren't engaged in the activity which showed by the fact that so few students wrote, many of the students not even having their notebooks open. This makes me worry. How important is it for students to take note on literature? And if it is really important how can we make students take notes without making them take notes?
posted by Sara Winterling | 10:52 AM
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